…goes to…
Jonathan Littell – The Kindly Ones!
The award was announced Monday night. You’re probably thinking what sort of passage earned the book this honor?
…a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as ‘I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg’
But my personal favorite, a section “in which Littell draws a comparison between a woman’s genitalia and ‘a Gorgon’s head … a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks’.”
HAH. Oh and I think The Guardian may have just clenched a nomination for Worst Sexual Imagery in Journalism in the same article.
The Kindly Ones, which tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of one of the executioners, beat off stiff competition from a stellar shortlist that included entries from Philip Roth, John Banville, Paul Theroux and the literary rock star Nick Cave.
If that award doesn’t exist, it should.